Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Is service failure the 21st century invariant?

Steve recommended Toumani Diabaté's latest album Mondé Variations. Being a Diabaté fan away from a good independent CD store, I rushed to find it on Amazon MP3. It was there, and I downloaded the small album download seed .amz file. I double-clicked on it, the Amazon downloader started, but then I had to pause the downloader because the net were I was (the Monashee backcountry) was just too slow for the download. I had got no tracks at that point. I resumed the download when I returned to faster net. But the downloader claimed that the tracks could not be downloaded. After several go-rounds with Amazon customer service in which they were unable to fix the problem, I asked for my money back.

The question is, does anybody in consumer services care any longer about reliability? I would be willing to pay CD prices (higher than what Amazon MP3 charges) for a solid, high-quality download service. No such luck.

About Me

I am VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where I lead work on natural-language understanding and machine learning. My previous positions include chair of the Computer and Information Science department of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the Machine Learning and Information Retrieval department at AT&T Labs, and research and management positions at SRI International. I received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and I have over 120 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming, as well as several patents. I was elected AAAI Fellow in 1991 for contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, ACM Fellow in 2010 for contributions to machine-learning models of natural language and biological sequences, and ACL Fellow in 2017 for contributions to sequence modeling, finite-state methods, and dependency and deductive parsing. I was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1993.